Saturday, June 22, 2013

It’s an interesting life, spending my days in the computer
department of a Yellow Pages publisher, while my evenings and weekends are
taken up with preparing for a lower-resource lifestyle that the end of cheap
energy will bring us. That’s a dichotomy
that took a while to come to terms with; I love technology, enjoy working in
the digital and mobile realms, and have invested significantly in my I.T. and
Management skills, yet my vision of the future is a world that is lower energy,
lower resources and considerable less affluent than the one we inhabit today.

Nothing has highlighted this conflict of expectations as
much as the planning for new digital products. Currently there is significant
demand for digital - in fact it’s the biggest objection our sales force hears
when selling Yellow Pages – “I don’t need to be in the book, I am on the
internet!” Recently we ran a series of training
course for our sales people, so they can explain better to our customers the
value of print over digital, why those customers are seeing a lack of returns
on their digital products, and a number of digital fallacies with the “adwords”
model which I highlighted almost two years ago on this blog.

Our salespeople were very surprised at how poorly Google Adwords
perform; by using Google's own tools, teaching them the Google keyword finder, they
know how to calculate how much each it costs the advertiser each time the
internet sends a customer their way. We’re
training our staff to impart that knowledge to our advertisers, because we want
the businesses in our local communities to be informed consumers of advertising
services, and that means giving them the tools to determine for themselves the
return-on-investment for each advertising dollar.

so far our digital products to date have been very
limited. For an extra ten percent of the
cost of the printed directory adverts, we can replicate the print advertising
package online, and in our mobile app.
If that seems cheap –and it is –it reflects how much value we place on digital
– worth perhaps a tenth of what the same exposure is worth in the books we
deliver to all the households in a community.
Since we do not have a national presence, we have a local customer base
around 5% of that of national yellow pages brands, we don't always score on the
first page of Google's results.

So how do we deliver value compared to them? If the advertiser has a website, another link
with the same name, address and phone number (NAT) increases the confidence
Google has in their web site being "trusted". I also suspect, from patterns in the data, that
myyp.com has a lot of business people visiting it, perhaps up to a third of the
traffic being B2B.

We regularly look at other digital products. Web sites are
an obvious example, with many Yellow Pages publishers selling web sites, SEO
services and other digital media, often from a third party. Vanity mobile applications for businesses, and
interactive ones that allow appointment setting, billing and a host of other
services between consumer and business, have caught our eye.

So far, nothing has convinced us that it's a good enough
value for the consumer, the advertiser, or ourselves, to adopt more than one product:
SMS messaging. What I like about this is the level of technology required to
support it: it works on the older "flip" style phones and will work
on the older models that supported text messaging, even those limited to
twitter-length messages.

I like it because it is resilient for an electronic product. It can work on a large number of phone platforms,
including ones we made when there was still technology manufacturing in the United
States. Even an eighties car phone, complete with brick battery, could receive
the marketing blast with the addition of a "modem" of the same era.

Am I disappointed we won’t get to play with the latest and
greatest digital products? Perhaps a little.
I still think there is time for a mobile application that helps refocus
the consumer on his or her local community, reward local loyalty behavior in
shopping patterns, and provide alternatives to the dollars hemorrhaging from
our communities to Wall Street via the big, publically traded corporations. Products
like punchcard are already a long way down the road, and I’ll be posting my
predictions on what any “game-changing” application might look like soon.

Products and services are not the only area where technology
meets the advertising world. Our techs
and programmers have their hands full making sure we are helping our sales
force provide the best value-for-money we can, to design, test and deploy the
systems that keep errors to a minimum, streamline the gathering and
presentation so those customers can make informed choices, and deliver those
choices to a still-loyal consumer base.

In the last few years we have taken our sales system
electronic, deployed mobile internet access for salespeople on the road, and
just last year we even gave our sale force smart phones. Tablets are under consideration and who
knows, the challenges of managing a few hundred iPads, Android tablets or
Windows 8 slates may be in our future.
They will be used to sell a product that has changed little in over a
century, and having stood the test of time will still be bringing value to
advertisers when our grandchildren are coping with a world defined by resource
depletion.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

One of my recent projects revolves around remote call
forwarding numbers. With the implementation of state-or-the-art sales software, we are looking at how we can also improve other services including the
tracking of calls to our advertisers. The
most common way of doing so is to use a “call tracking number” - also called a
Remote Call Forwarding (RCF) – that’s where a telephone number in the book is
different number from the regular business number. You call the 559-555-1234 printed in the Buy Local Guide, and behind the scenes the number forwards to 559-555-3912 – the front
desk or Mr. Advertiser.

When the phone ringing or the door opening was the only way
a customer got in touch, this model worked very well. Though the use of the RCF we show how Yellow
Pages advertising outperforms other traditional media, and also produces returns
that are an order of magnitude above what digital products can deliver today. However, the concept of an RCF number
introduces problems when the advertiser is heavily invested in digital
advertising.

While automation and computerization makes life easier and
allows larger and larger amounts of data to be sifted, processed and cataloged, it
does introduce flaws in those arenas where a computer does badly, like making intuitive jumps when two telephone
numbers don’t match but the name, address, storefront, products, services –even the person
smiling as they sell you a widget –are the same. We can figure out they are the same business.

Computers cannot make such a leap of logic - even the really
big ones at Google, Bing and Yahoo. Search engines are not
perfect, they are Frankenstein creations, with generation after generation building upon the successes and presumptions of their predecessors. They have to deal with diverse human languages developed over millennia,
with local phrasings and idiosyncrasies, and the messy way we humans label
things.

So when a local business has an RCF number printed in the Yellow
Pages directory, what happens? How does
this RCF affect their online presence and ability to be found on Google? Does it matter?

The answer is yes, and the impact can be very negative, particularly the ability of the advertiser to be found in the organic search engine results pages (SERPS). Google is very clear that the most important common metric
for local search is the NAP.

Name.

Address.

Phone number.

Linked
together, this string of vital data about your business is a “key” – that is a
unique reference that search engines use to put together all the info they have
on the business. The more consistent the
information is, the better a business shows up for a relevant search. In other words it adds to the pages “Page
Rank”. Add different, confusing data
such as a different telephone number, particularly in a directory that is
generally a “trusted source” due to having tens of thousands of correct numbers
listed, and the damage could be considerable.

Even if the RCF number is complete new and not already in
the Google database from being assigned to a different advertiser a couple of
years ago, that new NAP-combination will create issues. With a few weeks of publication that telephone
directory is keyed by data services, such as InfoGroup, Axciom or Localeze and distributed to many
places, including Google and other Yellow Pages companies.

Within weeks it is possible that the new RCF number will manage
to confuse and confound one of the biggest corporations on the planet – Google. To be more precise, it may have created almost-duplicate content in the database and when Mr. Consumer is looking for a widget provider,
Google sees two telephone numbers for this business and it is not sure if it is looking at one or two different widget providers.

Google does not like what it perceives as duplicates (a method subject to great abuse in the SEO world) so it lists you lower down on the results page than the
widget-provider across town, who never used an RCF number.

What can you do?

If most of your business comes from people walking though
the door or from local customers, calling you, or responding to coupons in your
local media, then this problem is not going to be that big a deal for you. If you are based in a brick-and-mortar business,
you customers are your neighbors, then I recommend spend your advertising dollars where
they work - in a local delivered and distributed product. Yellow pages are best (I'm biased) but I’d encourage you
to support local newspapers and local radio.
If your customers are local, so should your advertising. The potential loss from Google listing you twice is negligible when compared to knowing exactly which advert content generated the best results for your business.

If your business is internet based and the majority of your customers
are mail and internet-order, then you probably don’t want to use RCF numbers at
all. It’s when you fall between the two,
serving a local market but spending a lot of your advertising dollars online, that
is when it is going to be harder to use RCF’s effectively and without some negative
impact. Here are some ideas.

One technique you may try is to use a slightly different name in your NAP, one that is associated
with the call forwarding number but not with the normal business NAP and are
less likely to end up in your local cluster. It means trying to juggle two sets
of Google local data, and there’s no guarantee that algorithm changes designed
to catch people duplicating listings for nefarious purposes won’t penalize
these techniques in the future.

It’s possible to display the correct NAP (original desired
combination of Name, Address and Phone number) whenever the browser detects a
GoogleBot or a BingBot, and the RCF number only when it’s a browser viewing the
data. If you use RCF numbers internally, make sure your web master knows you
are using forwarding numbers.

There are no easy solutions to this predicament. The providers of RCF numbers need to address the issue of how it may impact the advertisers ongoing SEO efforts. Unless they do so quickly, then the internet-based advertising companies, with no loyalty to the local communities, will dominate the conversation. Sadly, it is in their interest to undermine the use of RCF on the basis of "it will mess up your internet advertising". The last thing a company trying to sell you adwords wants you to have is research that shows just how much better the ROI is on local advertising.

The dreams the internet vendors sell are in the clouds, whereas the leads Yellow Pages creates are in your local community.

Search for local businesses

About me.

Harry Lerwill is a British Ex-pat living and working in Fresno, California. He is the Information Systems Manager at Valley Yellow Pages, the largest privately owned Yellow Pages publisher in North America.

Harry has a keen interest in resource depletion and the affects it will have on communities, countries, international politics and finance.